@@yashrajgaikwad5629 LOTR didn't even release in India lmao. Where did you watch it p*jeet? Probably on your smartphone. Pa jeets in india like watching western fantasy bs for some reason and will be the first ones to defend them. Probably cause their own mythology sucks lmao. The first avatar still looks better than the newer hobbit series. Eww you're a lower caste gaikwad lmao, How did you end up here?
No, they are getting worse because visual effects are CGI now, so no more trickery like in the Lord of the Rings or ELF where they really had to place actors further away from one another to make them look bigger or smaller now everything is being replaced by crappy CGI because it is easier.
In that scene with Frodo and Gandolf, I never thought about how that's forced perspective. Now knowing that, I would assume that the wooden rectangle beams on each side are not the same size, but only appear to be the same to really secure it in our minds that Frodo's hand is far smaller than Gandolf's.
Making Tom Cruise as tall as or even taller than Kelly McGillis in Top Gun is the greatest SFX ever. You'd think he's 6'0 tall watching all of his movies despite being paired up with Nicole Kidman, Cameron Diaz, Olga Kurylenko or Rosamund Pike who are taller than him barefoot in real life.
the clip at 1:44 of "Darby O'Gill And The Little People" is a 1959 Disney film that set a certain standard for using forced perspective photography to make people look smaller, it is quite brilliant with some very complicated set ups and it has never quite been equalled, there is no Cgi and no back projection, the small characters and full size characters are on set at the same time , it is quite mind boggling to watch the film and try and figure out how it was done, it is totally convincing. Nowadays it is very easy to do with Cgi.
@@fireaza I think everyone knows that there was no Cgi in 1959, amazing practical effects were achieved back then that would be very easily achieved nowadays using modern Cgi, that is the point I was making so I guess you totally missed that!
In the LOTR they also have "Scale actors" : they were children or dwarves (small people, not the fantasy species) with the size the hobbits should have. There were used in larger camera shots when their faces were less precise in the camera.
Sharp-eyed watchers can see a giveaway to the forced perspective in the shot of Gandalf and Frodo at the table. Ian McKellan bumps his leg on the table during the scene, and only the front half of the table jiggles while the Elijah-sized half stays steady.
Need to give modern actors some credits in terms of using their imagination. It seems half the time they are acting/interacting with ppl/obj that are not even there.
From a technological standpoint this is all really impressive. But from a performance side I think it's a negative. You can just feel the disconnect in the performances when you can tell that people didn't film scenes together. Or when you see this elaborate cgi set but you know they were just looking at a bunch of green fabric. And considering that the cgi STILL looks artificial - I could not even remotely enjoy the 2nd Avatar film because the CGI was just so overt - , and often times just adds a bunch of needless noise to a scene, I'd settle for a less elaborate set, or more normal looking characters if it meant better performances from the actors.
There's a very good reason why movies that give major roles to puppet characters are very rare: it really doesn't look good. While it's cool that the turtles in the 1990 Ninja Turtles movie are real actors in real costumes, the animation on the robotic suits looks, well, robotic. The character's mouths just snap open and closed when they talk, it looks really unnatural. Which is a problem for a movie where the characters need to talk a lot. A puppet suit just wouldn't work for the aliens in _Avatar._ James Cameron is no hack, he knew what technology would be able to bring his vision to life, not because it would make the movie cheaper or faster to produce.
@@fireaza True, puppetry wasn't perfect and had it's limitations but you ask most actors and they prefer acting with a puppet that they can engage and respond with in real time rather than talking to a ball on a stick that's supposed to be something they wont even see until months, or even years, after filming is done. And while everyone agrees Avatar was a technological achievement, they also agreed that the story and acting were mediocre at best, Stephen Lang being the exception because he seemed to have fun chewing up his scenes. Nobody went and saw those movies for the characters. They went for the spectacle. So yes, in the case of something like Avatar, Cameron was able to get the look he wanted. But he sacrificed the quality of the acting. Which is just how things are now. Audiences have been trained to look at movies as assaults on the senses now, so I don't think they even really care about weak performances as long as there is a lot of stuff happening on screen.
"The trees are going to need to be 30% smaller if the characters are going to be 30% bigger." With maths like that I'm amazed they pulled this off. 🤣 Example: If the trees are made 100% bigger (ie double the size) the characters aren't made 100% smaller (ie non-existent). Percentages don't translate up and down the same.
That first VFX shot they show for Avatar looks terrible. I worked in Previs/Postvis and that's almost as bad the quality of our temp work. It's interesting that they went through the trouble to light the actors with a yellow/green light, yet the final CG environment mostly lit with blue lights. And the lighting on the Na'vi looks like a 1990s render. Very surprised that is the final version since so much of the film looked beautiful.
And I wonder how little these people who work on the movies actually see from a monetary standpoint considering some of these movies gross close to a billion dollars. I can pretty much guarantee you nobody who does any type of work like this ends up being rich unless they're on a owner of a company.
I was inspired by seeing the article: Keanu Reeves Gave $75M to 'Matrix' Crew Our policy is everyone in every position gets base pay, then if the film is a success they all get a cut of the profit.
I know, because it would really look fake if they were done by CGI. But I was being a jerk about Tom Cruise being short, which he kinda is in real life. I should do better, shame on me! ☹️
them wires hanging the small eyeline screens in Avatar were made of Kevlar If something screwed up those wires could seriously cut actors up into pieces
100%. These dummies in Hollywood think that the script doesn't matter. The script is MOST of what matters. Name me a special effects movie with an incredible script that bombed. Doesn't matter if it's a 75yr old comic book property or a brand new concept. You can not save a bad script with good CGI. Blows me away how often you hear a movie got greenlit with a 9 figure budget and no script but filming starts in 7 months.
And on a blockbuster, a great script will net you possibly hundreds of millions extra, yet it's treated as almost an afterthought (or if it's not, then I don't know what to say because too many scripts are absolute first draft garbage).
LOTR, Avatar were great, I have watched LOTR so many times but never got bored but avatar 2 it wasn't a great movie to watch, lacked story and direction.
The reason why LotR looks a million times better isn't because *"CGI BAD!"* but because they had years and years of pre-production for LotR. While Hobbit was switching directors and being re-written up until the last moment. It's a small miracle it doesn't look even worse than what it does.
Yeah alright, the tech, tricks and cgi is super cool and all, but personally, if I was an actor, this kind of movie shoot and "performance" would bore me to death.
I was thinking the same. For the walk scene they could have just scaled her up on stock backround. Noone would have cared. Thinking about it, it wouldn't have made a big difference if they had just face-swapped a taller actor painted green.
Film production hit a snag with 3D, but why are they filming everything in 3D anyway? Film productions could save a whole lot of money if they just did 2D and spent the money saved on better writing and screenplay. 3D for me is and will always be just a gimmick, I've always been disappointed with all the movies I did watch in 3D, especially The Last Airbender which by far is the worst movie in 2D and 3D.
By all their greatness, today's movies let no room for the viewer's fantasy allthough the story and the dialogs are of minor quality. Today's streaming platforms present hardly any content without superhumans, weaponry, huge destruction and meaningless heroism with the rate of a daily newspaper. The story is more important than the money behind the movie version.
